Nobel Winners Sign Letter Backing Obama Space Plan

The House bill, the writers said, would leave “substantially underfunded” the areas of technology development, commercial spaceflight, robotic missions, and university and student research.

“These are the key elements of the president’s new plan for NASA that must be retained in any consensus solution reached by Congress and the White House,” said the letter, delivered to the office of Representative Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat who leads the Committee on Science and Technology. .

G. Scott Hubbard, who was director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, said he and John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, came up with the idea for the letter.

In his budget request for the 2011 fiscal year, Mr. Obama proposed canceling the Constellation program for returning astronauts to the moon, financing commercial companies for taking astronauts to the International Space Station and developing new space technologies.

A Senate version of the authorization bill, passed last month, reduced money for commercial crew and technology development to finance the development of a heavy-lift rocket. The House bill would take away almost all the money from the commercial crew program and instead offer loan guarantees.